Harry Hertz is director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. In a recent post, available here, he used three questions you—or your senior leaders—can use to decide if a Baldrige journey is right for your organization:

1. Is your organization doing as well as it could?
2. How do you know?
3. What and how should your organization improve or change?

Those are three great questions. I can’t think of any organization that’s doing as well as it could. Even Baldrige Award winners only score around 700 out of a possible 1000 points. There’s always room for improvement. The difference between Baldrige winners and most other organizations is that the winners really know how well they are doing and what and how they should improve and change. They know that because they integrated the Baldrige model, and they integrated Baldrige by answering the questions in the Baldrige Criteria and closing the gaps that those answers revealed.

As Hertz concludes, the Criteria “make sure you are truly considering everything that is important in a systematic and systemic way.”

If you’re curious about what that means, read the Criteria for businesses and nonprofits, healthcare, or education.

If you want to know what it looks like to answer Hertz’s three questions well, read the award application summaries of Baldrige Award winners, which are available here.

If you would like more information about the Baldrige program, click here.

To learn more about integrating the Baldrige model, click on these articles:

• Baldrige 101
• Baldrige Gets Results
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Baldrige Consulting: Build a World-Class Management System

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